Circle Story Week

I have to say this might have been one of my favorite weeks of teaching. We had the story If You Give A Pig A Pancake by Laura Joffe Numeroff in our reader so we took all of her adorable books and did an activity with each one of them. I hope the kids enjoyed the week as much as I did! We were very busy!!

 

We started the unit with the first circle story she wrote If You Give A Mouse a Cookie. We then made these cute mice and inside the mouse was the story events sequenced. After reading this story we read If You Take a Mouse to School and did a booklet that had a lot of math problem solving in it.

 

Next we read the two circle stories If You Give a Pig a Pancake and If You Give a Pig a Party. We then made some really cute real and fantasy sentences about pigs…which I forgot to take pictures of.

After reading If You Give a Cat a Cupcake we made these adorable cupcakes with lots of sprinkles on them and sequenced the story events in a circle to map out the story. They loved this activity!

 

 

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Now that we have read through all the circle stories we then did some creative writing of our own. I love to read their ideas. Here is a booklet we made where they paired up an animal with a food and wrote what would happen next.

     

We then took the mouse, the pig, the moose, and the cat and wrote super sentences. We brainstormed describing words for the characters before they started writing. Then they used the sentence wheel to add an action and a place. Then shared them with our friends. As you can see, they LOVE to share their creativity!!

 

 

All of our centers this week were based on the characters from our circle stories too. We worked on a word sort of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, sentence scramble, cookie sort using all the long vowel sounds, school and book sorting using the oo digraph sounds, buying muffins for the moose using money combinations, party time for the pig matching times to the hour and half hour, comparing food that the characters ate using our greater and less than symbols to compare the numbers, and putting cupcakes together to make compound words, and pancake flip putting numbers in order from least to greatest.

What a fun week! We did so many other activities to go with this unit, but of course when you are busy teaching it is hard to get photos of everything we did. Now it is Spring Break…If You Give a teacher a Spring Break she will blog about her wonderful class and blogging will remind her that she has more centers and activities to make so she will need to get to work!

Enjoy the beautiful sunshine and the spring break! See you next week!!

No Ordinary Potato!

It isn’t St. Patrick’s day without a “patties” talk. We read a cute Irish folk tale by one of our favorite authors, Tomie DePaola called Jamie O’Rourke and the Big Potato. It is about a lazy Irishman that gets a potato seed from a leprechaun (instead of his gold). When he plants it he gets an ENORMOUS potato that the whole village has to help dig up and eat. We then got creative and cut out our own enormous potato from brown construction paper and then turned that ordinary potato into our own potato character. They were so creative! It was fun watching them go to work on their characters. Here’s a look: (Yes, that is Jacob Pullen from K-State as a potato head!)

 

We had no ordinary potatoes…we had Luke Skywalker, the tooth fairy, Elvis, a princess, a few potato cars, a leprechaun, Michael Jackson, a snowman, Mario Little from KU, a dinosaur, a football player, and Sponge Bob just to name a few. It was so fun to watch them create these! By the time we were finished these were no ordinary potatoes anymore.